‘I thought it was just sisterly.’
‘I hated Nell that whole evening. I had no nice sisterly feelings at all.’
There was silence. The back of her head, the line of her body. The rain had lessened, but it stayed overcast. He forced out his confession, as if reluctantly. What he really began to feel was a delicious excitement.
‘It’s mad. But I think I’m in love with both of you.’
‘That’s exactly how I feel.’
‘God. What a mess.’
‘It’s my fault. I wasn’t going to bring it up.’
‘That thing in the reeds.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘It goes back quite a long way with me. You were such a success I didn’t know how to get near you.’
Another silence.
She said, ‘It’s like catching ‘flu. You have it before you can do anything about it.’
‘Except there are simple ways of treating ‘flu.’
She left a pause.
‘One usually goes to bed, doesn’t one?’
A long moment. He whispers, ‘Jane?’ She lies curled away, perched on an elbow. ‘You can’t really mean that.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s so difficult to explain. I feel in some way Anthony’s made me miss something. What you and Nell have. What my body dreams.’
‘Rabelais?’
‘I suppose to be wild and wanton.’
‘Wild and wanton’ was a stock undergraduate phrase of the time, and always used mockingly.
‘But what you just said…’
‘I do love him, Dan. In a strange sort of way it’s because I love him.’ She added, ‘Want to love him.’
He felt more and more out of his depth, yet unable not to go on.
‘Want to know if you can love him?’
There was a silence, and when she broke it her voice was so low he hardly heard the words.
‘Just once. An acte gratuit?’
He stared at his shoes. ‘And tomorrow?’
‘If we knew exactly what we were doing. That we could keep it outside time. As an exorcism.’
He swallowed secretly. ‘An exorcism of what?’
‘What must happen. What will happen.’
‘Knowing we love each other?’
‘Knowing we once wanted each other. And that at least once we’d had the courage to admit it.’
He could feel his sexual excitement on the rise; and an ungovernable desire not to resist it, despite what he then said.
‘I don’t know how we could ever face them.’
‘We seem to have managed to hide things so far. Even from each other.’
He said, ‘It’s not that I… ‘ but once again his sentence floated away.
He felt paralysed, stunned by the enormity, ravished by the strangeness. The silence grew, and she did not move. From across the gardens at the back there drifted through the rain the sound of an oboe, a rise and descent of progressive scales, skilled and rapid. Then a break.
She sat up and faced him. He felt she was looking at him for the first time. Those gentle but penetrating brown eyes, searching his; something oddly virginal about her at that moment, of a schoolgirl, a seventeen-year-old frightened at what her older self had done; but with a faint smile that did not deny, yet somehow counterbalanced the innocence. Perhaps it was provoked by something still wavering in his own expression, for the smile also held a tiny hint of a challenge; or of a tease, as if she were proposing no more than a dare.
The student oboist began to play Delius, and she reached her free hand across the rug, almost formally, like a medieval bride.
Passage
Daniel nearly missed his flight, owing to a traffic snarl-up. For once the sky was almost smogless, a lovely midwinter Californian morning. The grey-haired Polish cabdriver kept cursing freeways in general and the San Diego in particular, but he was in far more of a rage about it than his fare: an I in the hands of fate, Isherwood’s camera, not unhappily reduced to watching himself, as if he were indeed a fiction, a paper person in someone else’s script… the seed of a hypothesis, like the ‘Simon Wolfe’ planted in his mind the night before. Perhaps that ancient jibe about him, Mr Specula Speculans, had not been quite fair: a love of mirrors may appear to be only too literally prima facie evidence of narcissism, but it can also be symbolic of an attempt to see oneself as others see one to escape the first person, and become one’s own third.
In his already rather low valuation of the novel (a dismissal Daniel knew perfectly well was on the one hand a cheap conditioning of his metier and on the other a product of the lazy assumption that he was long past finding in himself, poor asthmatic cripple, the athleticism of imagination and long wind the form must need) he reserved an especially, and symptomatically, dark corner for first-person narration; and the closer the narrative approximated to what one could deduce of the authorial, the more murky this corner grew. The truth was that the objectivity of the camera corresponded to some deep psychological need in him; much more to that than to the fundamental principle of aesthetic (and even quasi-moral) good taste that he sometimes pretended lay behind his instinct here.
What did dimly occur to him as he sat half-listening and half-abetting his driver’s determination to show that he was now truly American, America is a perfect society, perfect societies have no snarls and flaws, so what the goddam hell is going on—was that perhaps this flinching from the I inherent in any honest recapitulation of his life was no more than a fear of judgment; and that (Jenny’s reported remark concerning perfectionism had also lodged much closer home than she may have realized) doing what he obscurely wanted was intimately bound up with doing what he obscurely hated. He even tried it out: ‘I missed my flight (or I nearly missed my flight), owing to a traffic holdup on the San Diego freeway’ and did not like the sound and feel of it one bit.
At last they began to crawl forward, to within sight of the accident, the flashing lights, that were causing the stopped lines of impotent quadrirotal man. In his characteristic English fashion, Dan carefully filed away this added reason for why he was condemned to be what he was; how clear it was, if he ever did attempt the impossible, that anything would be better than to present it in the first person… even the absurdity of a mythical Simon Wolfe.
I was also very tired that morning. Jenny hadn’t released me for another hour. There had been tears, not quite for the first time since we had met, but for the first time over our private relationship.
The idea for her picture had come during a stint on another script in Hollywood three years previously. The studio had found me one of those British girl secretaries who work their way round the States, though not very attractive physically, she had possessed a sense of humour and a long tongue. I enjoyed her dry coffee-break accounts of her various work-experiences and abortive romances before she came to me, I’d long wanted to contrive something on the Anglo-American cultural comedy… so Jenny was now a trained English nanny in a millionaire household in one of the chic canyons, fighting a losing battle against both her employers and her off-duty boyfriend Steve Anderson’s part. She could play the character close enough to her real self. Steve was and is the most frightful young bore, but his part also offered scope for his real-life fixations and dedicated self-involvement. I’m afraid director and scriptwriter had deliberately cultivated a certain amount of off-camera antipathy between their two stars. I didn’t tell her, but I had in fact begun to respect Steve in the can, if not in the flesh. On screen, in the rushes, her controlled insularity and his would-be ‘Method’ sloppiness mixed rather well… as we had hoped. We had also lied about his not being our first choice.
It was a white lie, since we had very much wanted a girl to whom the Californian dream-nightmare was as fresh in reality as it had to be in the story. I knew how insidious the place is, how fast it warps the stranger to its own peculiar ways, so her virginity there was important. That also meant the film was going to be a tougher proposition than she realized. I
played pig at Claridges partly for this reason: to warn her that whatever her local successes she was now stepping out of home movies, in both senses, into a very different and potentially much more lonely world. Then we were scared she might be overawed by Steve’s ill-deserved reputation (and get to hear how much more he was taking). I watched her like a hawk during those first days, for purely professional reasons… which became more personal ones, of course, though I liked her all the better for apparently deciding that she didn’t need my help. She showed a brisk blend of tact and independence, ancestral Scottish qualities I value far more than the second sight.
Like so many pretty, and far from stupid, girls in the business she was in a slight dilemma incipiently crucified by her own good looks. It is not perhaps the kind of crucifixion the ordinary girl can have much sympathy for; nevertheless, it exists… and Jenny had the camera image that conforms too closely to current notions of what is sexually desirable in young women to escape. A certain leggy fragility, an elegant insouciance, a well-boned, fine-mouthed, candid-eyed eager frankness about the face… a nice ongoing kid, the lens said, searching as well as enticing to go to bed with; a twentieth-century princess, provoking very nearly the same dream as the real princesses who had once languished in their walled castles and haunted another age besotted with the concept of the unattainable.
She had done a little modelling work at home, and knew well enough how to get herself up to kill, and to ‘project’, vanities she didn’t always resist. Even tired, with her completely natural face, she couldn’t always lose that air of vacuous distinction and effortless beauty that highly photographable women, the Shrimptons and Twiggies of this world, acquire. She was conscious of it, of course; and had a special clown’s grimace for when she knew I had caught that look. I remember another evening, we’d been to a party and she had looked ravishing even with some expert competition, and I said so when we got home. She went straight into the bathroom and washed her face off. When she came out she said, ‘I forbid you to like me for that.’
This problem of being her own young woman, not just the chauvinistic male world’s dream of the type, distorted her in another way: her frostiness with men who took her at the obvious surface valuation was sometimes painfully gauche and indeed misled me in the beginning. It was right for the part, that aloofness; but in private I found it rather silly, all this gazelle-like shying-away from the slightest wrong approach, even though she grew to hide it better. Another self, both warmer and less assured, I caught only glimpses of in the early days. None of us could really get near her, and it was hard to tell what was genuine and what was being tried out in pursuit of a working persona in a very alien environment.
It was Bill who warned me that she might be withdrawing too much. By then the thought of giving her a shoulder to rest on was not just a matter of production need or simple human charity, yet there did remain an element of calculation… which remained in substance, even if it changed in nature. She did need me, or someone like me, in Los Angeles; but it remained very open whether she needed me anywhere else. This doesn’t mean that we had not achieved a very real affection. I could have fallen heavily for her, and become intolerably possessive; but I had sinned in that area often enough before to know that to take one’s partner’s independence as a challenge is the straight road to disaster. Wanting her was bound up with the notion of changing her, and I liked her too well as she was. Just as ‘I believe in God’ is generally a synonym for ‘I believe in not thinking’, only too frequently ‘I love you’ is a euphemism for ‘I want to own you’. I sincerely wanted to leave Jenny in the public gallery of her own freedom; and at the same time I was still also in love with both her body and her independence.
The tears were partly spoilt-child tears, glycerine drops; and also more genuine ones. I gave way to the blackmail. We’d forget the whole evening, it had never happened. She’d fly back as soon as she was released. It was just a temporary separation. Training, she said; and I let it pass.
Then I had driven back to Bel-Air, which is not where any Englishman in Los Angeles can normally afford to live and where I lived purely by kindness and an old friendship. An early script I did for Columbia failed to meet with studio approval and they brought in Abe Nathan to help me rewrite it. He had more or less given up the trade by then, but he was still on call for crises. I was piqued, and prepared not to like him one bit. But not all studio decisions are crass. The story needed the ‘doctor’, and I needed the lesson; I fell for the professionalism, and even more for Abe himself as I did for his wife Mildred when I came to know her as well. He might wear the full livery the old Hollywood forced on its educated slaves: be cynical, lugubrious, obscene, suspect the worst of everything and everybody but he failed abysmally to hide the fact that this persona was very largely a matter of Millerian mimicry (the evolution in a harmless species of the appearance of a dangerous one); and that underneath the waspishness lay a shrewd, humane and fundamentally tolerant mind. I had let him read every one of my scripts ever since. Even though the recipes of his own heyday no longer worked, he retained a very sure nose for the weak spots in the new ones and in much else besides.
Mildred and he live in the wilder, less posh section of Bel-Air ‘where the quail still speak Spanish’. Theirs is not the opulent mansion the place is more famous for… not even a swimming-pool, though that is an invert ostentation; but a pleasantly ramshackle garden, incongruously studded with classical statues, the weatherproofed plaster props from some forgotten Roman epic, with the ‘cabin’ up the hill. Abe built it to write in himself, but he had long let me appropriate it when I was in town. It lacks one or two hotel amenities, but is buried in greenery and birds’ voices. I can be alone there, or with them down at the house. I don’t like Los Angeles, increasingly detest those famous hundred suburbs in search of a city. But Abe, Mildred and the Cabin would make hell itself tolerable.
I had packed when I got back there, then snatched four hours’ sleep, to be woken by Jenny’s voice again on the telephone. Her own wakeup call had just come in. She was her normal self again; apologized for being ‘silly’. Need was reaffirmed. I would broach the matter of her taking over the Cabin. I would call from home as soon as I could.
I went down to the house. Abe was already about and he gave me coffee, while I told him my news. Of course Jenny could take over the Cabin if she liked; whichever, he and Mildred would see she didn’t get too lonely. I wanted this for more than the obvious kind reasons, since Mildred and he represent a formidable combination of Jewish commonsense and New England frankness. Few secrets survive for long near them. Jenny needed to get to know them both out of my presence, to be their temporary shiksa daughter instead of my cute little British bird. I was hopeful that as soon as she revealed my view of our relationship, they would take my side. They approved of Jenny as a person, but not of cradle-snatching. They also knew my past much better than she did… and my faults.
There was an element of doing a far, far better thing, killing two lapses with one exit but we really were viable only in a culture where nobody ever grows old (especially if they are rich and successful) and trading in well-screwed for younger flesh is an accepted way of life. I had known a number of father-daughter marriages there. The girls weren’t all the high-class platinum hookers of the old days; most were rather demure and reserved creatures, and some even had a sort of dignity, or perhaps it was just a smooth complacency at having sidestepped the tedium of being young and broke. It was the men who seemed to me more made the fools; and besides, Jenny had too much sense, too close an attachment to the freedoms of her generation, ever to deny herself the full potentialities of her future… and however hard I might have tried to subvert her from them. She had, or sometimes pretended with me that she had, a jejune notion that she’d seen it all; that I was, as she brutally (too brutally to be convincing) estimated, the best she was likely to get. But that was a nonsense passing time must explode. I had no right to encourage such an illusion; and I had cate
gorically no wish to pick up the emotional tab when it was shattered.
I suppose the experience with Nell formed me there, no doubt on a predisposed Freudian pattern. Living with a woman has always seemed to me an artificial situation, pseudo-dramatic in nature; that is, an area where invention and concealment are as important as reality and honesty. I have always needed secrets. I write that clinically, not vainly. I live in front of too many wrong decisions, I cannot rid my life of them, the least I can do is to hide them from my lady guests… that is the practical theory, at any rate. Perhaps I had grown to like Abe and Mildred so much simply because they were clear proof that the theory is inadequate; that better relationships can exist. They are two people who have principally defined my own Englishness by their lack of it. I once outraged them both by arguing that most English anti-semitism, like most English anti-Americanism, sprang out of sheer envy. They did not like simple evil explained as complex loss, or failure to evolve. You poor sons of bitches, snarled Abe, deprived of the gas-ovens… but that wasn’t the point.
We took off. After a minute, by craning back, I could even make out Burbank and the roofs of the Warner lot stages, under one of which Jenny must have been facing the first take of the day. I did feel a guilt then, tenderness, a protectiveness. She would never be an outstanding actress, as the middle-aged woman I had spoken to the previous night might once conceivably have been, and I knew she hadn’t fully accepted that as yet: the closed options, the compromises to come.
East, at altitude, over the deserted mountains of North Arizona and the toy gash of the Grand Canyon: there had been talk between Jenny and myself of driving back overland when her work was done. But that was a foregone experience I didn’t regret, since there was another chasm beside that of age. The life we led in Los Angeles had allowed us to overlook it, turn it into another toy gash of no more than a trivial passing significance; but in another context, on the ground, I knew it would always have presented a much more formidable obstacle. It was my fault, in the sense that I had effectively reduced it to the status of one more secret about my past though in this case, not only with Jenny.